Why outsourcers sell you January and lose you in March

• Per-job outsourcing is sold on your worst month and priced for it.
• The provider's incentive ends the moment the job does. So does their memory of your clients.
• By June you are back on the job boards, because nothing was built in between.
• A standing team, flexed by seat size, keeps the knowledge and removes the annual scramble.

The pitch always lands in November

We run a practice. We know exactly when the outsourcing emails start arriving. It is late autumn, the self assessment pile is visible from space, and somebody is offering to take two hundred returns off your hands at a price per return that looks like a rounding error next to what you charge.

It works because it solves the problem you can feel. January is brutal. Your team is tired. One more resignation and you are doing returns yourself at eleven at night. An offer that says "we will do the grunt work, you just review" is the right offer at that moment.

The trouble is not that the offer is dishonest. It is that it is built for January and only for January.

Per-job pricing is priced for the peak

Look at how per-job outsourcing is sold. Offshore market rates are roughly £15–40 a self assessment return, £120–300 a set of small company accounts, £25–60 a VAT return (our reading of published offshore price lists in 2026; see the ranges on our compare page). Those prices assume volume. They assume you send a batch, the provider staffs up, the batch clears, everybody moves on.

That model is tuned for a spike. It is not tuned for the other ten months. When you send three VAT returns in May, you are a low-priority client. Your work goes to whoever is free, which is often whoever is newest. The turnaround you were promised in January quietly stretches.

And here is the bit nobody says on the sales call: the provider does not want you to need them in May. They want you to need them in January, at scale. Their business is built around peaks, which means their attention is too.

The incentive ends when the job ends

Think about what a per-job provider is paid for. A finished return. A finished set of accounts. The moment it is delivered, the money is earned and the relationship with that piece of work is over.

Nothing in that arrangement rewards the provider for remembering how your client's director loan works, or that one of your clients always sends the van invoices late, or that your review partner wants the fixed asset note laid out a particular way. All of that is overhead to them. It is not billable.

So it does not get kept. The next batch arrives and it is done from scratch, by whoever picks it up. You get the same questions you answered last year. Your team re-explains the same things. The "saving" leaks out in emails.

Knowledge leaves with the job

This is the cost that never appears on the invoice. Every piece of client knowledge your per-job provider builds during January is gone by February. The person who did the work has moved on to another firm's batch. The notes, if there were any, are in their system, not yours.

In a practice, client knowledge is the whole game. It is why your senior can turn a set of accounts around in a morning and a new starter takes two days. It is why clients stay. When you outsource the job but not the relationship, you get the work done once and learn nothing from it.

We have watched this happen from the inside. A practice uses a per-job provider for three Januaries in a row and at the end of it is no better placed than it was at the start. Same bottleneck, same panic, same November email.

By June you are hiring again

Follow the year through. January clears, somehow. February is recovery. March brings year ends and the first VAT quarter. By May you have noticed the outsourcer is slower than they were. By June you are writing a job advert for a part-qualified, because per-job never fixed the underlying problem: you do not have enough standing capacity for the work you have.

Then you discover what a hire actually costs. A part-qualified on £32–38k (Indeed and PayScale salary data, 2026) comes out around £44–52k all-in once you add employer NI, pension, software, a desk and the recruiter fee. That is our working rule of thumb, salary times roughly 1.35. And you might wait three months to get them, and lose them eighteen months later to a firm with a shinier office.

So you go back to the outsourcer in November. Round and round.

What the alternative looks like

The alternative is not "outsource more". It is a standing team that belongs to your practice, sized by seat rather than by job, and flexed up and down as the year moves.

A seat is a named person, on your software under their own login, working your clients every month. They learn your files. They learn your clients. They learn your reviewer. In January they do returns. In May they do bookkeeping, VAT, onboarding, chasing records, whatever the practice needs that month. The knowledge stays because the person stays.

Flexing works at the seat level. A practice might run one full Accounts seat year-round and add a half-time Production seat for the busy quarter. Or start part-time and grow as the work proves itself. Rolling monthly, one month's notice, no lock-in. The shape is on our pricing page and the mechanics are on how it works.

The comparison we keep coming back to: a full Production seat is £23,400 a year against a UK equivalent hire at £36–44k all-in. That is not the point, though. The point is that the seat is there in June.

Where per-job still makes sense

We will be fair. If you have a one-off backlog, a genuine one-off, then pay per job and be done. If your whole outsourcing need is twenty returns a year, a seat is overkill. Buy the twenty returns.

But if you are on your second or third November email, the problem is not January. The problem is that you are buying a peak service for a year-round gap.

Where to start

Put your real monthly volumes into the capacity calculator and see what seat size the work actually needs across the year, not just in January. Then talk to us about how a standing team would fit. We muck in; we do not disappear in March.

Published 22 August 2026. Tax rules and rates change — check current figures on gov.uk before relying on anything here. This is general information for practice owners, not advice.